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Re: (emacs) Intro [was: Making Emacs popular again with a video]


From: Richard Stallman
Subject: Re: (emacs) Intro [was: Making Emacs popular again with a video]
Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 23:17:06 -0400

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This is a good start.  Overall, I like it.

I would suggest systematically changing the passive voice to active,
except where there is some specific reason to use passive.  We try to
avoid making a habit of passive voice.

  >  enabling far more than simple insertion
  > + and deletion of characters.  With it, you can operate on words or
  > + lines, sentences or paragraphs, even whole pages. 

These particular feaures may not be worth mentioning nowadays.  Some
other editors can operate on words and lines.

  > - As brought up in the "GNU Emacs Raison d'etre" thread, it
  > - appears "We love GNU Emacs because we feel that no other editing
  > - environment rewards sustained user investment quite like it."  I
  > - buried this in the last paragraph because it flowed. 

I like the way you mentioned it.  I don't agree that this is Emacs's
"raison d'etre", but saying that we love Emacs because of this is
valid.

  > https://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/hopl-4-emacs-lisp.pdf
  > - Real-time editor is used differently here than it appears to have meant 
in 1976.  I have used it here as shorthand for "without having to restart 
Emacs".

In regard to Emacs, "real-time editor" means that the text changes
immediately as you type characters.  This contrasts with line-based editors
such as Basic's editor, and command-string input editors such as TECO.

Nowadays this is the usual way, so I agree it is not worth mentioning
here.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)





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